I’ve been doing a lot of science history. But because I miss courting controversy every once in a while, let’s do some science-happening-right-now.
I’m bracing myself and dipping my toe in the lab leak mess.
Hold me.
Today’s part one of a two part Moment of Science… plausibility versus evidence.
Jon Fucking Stewart.
I wasn’t going to say anything. Then this guy, who once got human boat shoe Tucker Carlson kicked off the air with the tactic of calling him a piece of shit to his face, was on the Late Show with his bestie Stephen Colbert. Crawling out of his hidey hole to bid us hello as he does once a season, he screamed ‘LAB LEAK,’ then disappeared, likely to sporadically post esoteric ramblings on twitter once a month until he next shows up under Colbert’s desk.
It’s not that we’ve ruled out the lab leak. But “we haven’t ruled it out” isn’t even flimsy evidence, it’s an absence of evidence. We also haven’t officially ruled out Ben Shapiro fishing it out of a W.A.P. as the origin, but the evidence that he’s ever witnessed one of those situations is likewise absent.
Stewart exclaimed that “the name of the disease is on the building, what are the odds? There’s a novel respiratory virus taking over China, oh, know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird. Then the scientists are like ‘mmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle?’“
Let’s get something straight- the pure and true love story of the pangolin and Mitch McConnell is still a better love story than Twilight and has no place in virology.
However, the lab is not called the “Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.” It’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So name notwithstanding, why would there be this lab that researches coronaviruses right where fucking covid “coincidentally” happened?
Correlation is not necessarily causation. Because sure, we haven’t ruled out that the lab was the source. But you don’t bring the mountain to Mohammed, and in this case, that means Mohammed opens a lab where all the fucking bats with coronaviruses are. The area is a wellspring of bats just hopping with hundreds of novel coronaviruses, and setting up shop there is just convenient for access to the bats. It’s not a case of a virology lab being there and, in the event of dropping a petri dish, the handbook says to use bats as a convenient scapegoat. Bats with coronaviruses live there, ergo, the lab.
To drive home this point with an itchier, more familiar disease, Colbert joked in the interview, “I’m suspicious of the Daytona Beach Spring Break Herpes Lab. That might be where all the herpes comes from.”
Another point Stewart made was that there are bats in other parts of the world, yet they haven’t birthed apocalyptic plagues. Astute observation, but hear me out…
Some species of bats in some parts of the world carry endemic coronaviruses, and others don’t.
Bats in the UK aren’t known to carry coronaviruses at this time, but a 2007 study of bats in the US showed that, indeed, some of ours do. You might be wondering, why then no Tampa Coronavirus? Simply, we’ve been lucky. Nobody’s tongue kissed the wrong bat in our part of the world so far. But this is America, I promise you that Florida Man is gonna get right on it.
Then there are, seemingly, more scientific arguments. Donald G. McNeil, former science reporter for the NYT, wrote a Medium article on the subject. Though some of his arguments were compelling at first glance, a lot of his his wordy article boiled down to the usual tripe:
‘China has had a lack of candor.’
‘The lab was doing active research that involved altering coronaviruses.’
‘At the beginning of the outbreak the wet market was hosed down. They say it was to clean up the germs but maybe it was a cover up.’
I hear you. Nothing’s ruled out a lab leak, but let’s be a bit more honest with ourselves.
None of that is proof that China did this on purpose.
There’s a severe lack of virologists saying this looks engineered.
We’ve yet to see firm evidence that points to this coming from a lab.
Nobody claims they know for a fact that the virus was leaked, and nobody who’s pushing back on that claims to know which fucking bat, pangolin, or Ben Shapiro shat this thing into existence. But screeds reading “well they were researching and altering these viruses, lab leaks can happen, ipso facto” aren’t enough.
Not having the answer does not mean that we default to this being an engineered virus that was leaked from a laboratory, a situation that’s pretty fucking rare. When looking through history for “bioengineered leaked viruses” level rare, we’re pretty much down to that time in Russia with the super smallpox.
This has been part one for a two part Moment of Science, reminding you that viruses come and go, but conspiracy theories are forever.
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Y’all, we’ve licked things we shouldn’t have.
Part two of this two part Moment of Science… Why this stupid fucking coronavirus most likely came from a bat’s ass.
Why do zoonotic crossover events happen? Simply, because not all immune systems are created equal. And bats have particularly fancy immune systems.
Their immune systems treat viruses like unruly bar patrons that just need to sober up but don’t need to be kicked out. If you could pin a philosophy to an immune system, the bat’s immune system would read ‘live and let live.’ Because it’ll get a virus to shut the fuck up and leave it alone, but it won’t kick the virus out of their system. For the most part, a coronavirus in a bat will just kinda stay there, not doing anything. At least not until the bat flies mouth or ass first into something interesting.
Kinda like all of us with our HPV infections.
The first suspected case of SARS was documented on November 16th, 2002, in Guangdong province in southern China. It took until 2013 for the bat population incubating the virus in Yunnan, China to be found. Leading the charge to find them was Dr. Shi Zheng-Li. She’s also known as the ‘batwoman’ searching for the bat of record that bequeathed us with covid. In 2017, she and her team found another repository of bats in the region that provided us with new insights on SARS and SARS related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoV).
This is our third deadly coronavirus to have come via zoonotic crossover in the last twenty years. SARS leaked out of a bat as well. Though it’s likely MERS came to us via the dromedary camel, it’s believed to have an ancestral host in the bat.
There are about 70 documented zoonotic diseases, from anthrax to Zika. Zoonotic crossover events aren’t even remotely rare. They happen via a couple routes of transmission, but it almost always comes down to ‘mealtime.’ Disease can spread when you’re preparing the animal into a meal, when eating the animal, or to balance out the food chain, when the infected thing sinks its teeth into you.
Ebola, Zika, Lyme, HIV, West Nile, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, MERS, and of course, SARS the OG? All zoonotic diseases that emerged largely within my lifetime. Though you find the occasional person screaming that HIV came from a lab, people are pretty comfortable accepting zoonotic crossover is a thing that keeps happening.
In the case of coronaviruses, it keeps happening in the same region. With a similar virus. From the same species. Here’s a tall glass of water for all these hard-to-swallow pills.
There’s a simple reason why people didn’t go down a messy and ultimately unfruitful rabbit hole of ‘lab leak’ for these other diseases. Millions of people weren’t trapped at home, bored and under-employed for a year, because of West Nile or Lyme disease. We’re familiar and have a level of comfort with the concept of those animals passing diseases. Since it’s something that’s happened before in ways we understand, of course it’s happening again. Even though Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease is pretty atypical in presentation and transmission, we’re familiar enough with the concept of ‘eat infected animal, become infected animal.’
At this point, they’ve found multiple feral coronaviruses in bats that are close matches to covid. One was identified from Dr. Shi Zheng-Li’s lab that was collected in the 2013 expeditions to Yunnan that had a 96% genetic match.
So do we know that it came from a bat? Nah. But given the long history of zoonotic transmission, that’s what I’m hanging my hat on. Our understanding of its origin might change, but it won’t change how we relate to it, how we keep ourselves safe, and the necessity to vaccinate and likely update our vaccines as new variants emerge.
Until any of that changes, I’m not giving the “lab leak hypothesis” another fucking thought.
This has been the second part of this extended moment of science, reminding you that mosquitoes are still the deadliest animal on the planet and nobody can find a compelling reason for their continued existence.
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